Confessions of a cultural elitist

I have put up the above-title article by Ted Rall in full because Yahoo articles tend not to stay up for long.

The article is of course an unashamed claim of superiority for Democrats and “Blue State” inhabitants. Insofar as it is an argument rather than mere assertion, however, it is easily demolished. Before I do that, though, read it for yourself.

Confessions of a cultural elitist
Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
by TED RALL

NEW YORK—Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception “in the heartland” that Democrats are a “bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives.”

Firstly, living in the sticks doesn’t make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban—they’re irrelevant. San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there’s a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election.

I spent my childhood in fly-over country, in a decidedly Republican town in southwest Ohio. It was a decent place to grow up, with well-funded public schools and only the occasional marauding serial killer to worry about. The only ethnic restaurant sold something called “Mandarin Chinese,” Midwestese for cold noodles slathered with sugary sauce. The county had three major employers: the Air Force, Mead Paper, and National Cash Register—and NCR was constantly laying people off. Folks were nice, but depressingly closed-minded. “Well,” they’d grimace when confronted with a new musical genre or fashion trend, “that’s different.” My suburb was racially insular, culturally bland and intellectually unstimulating. Its people were knee-jerk conformists. Faced with the prospect of spending my life underemployed, bored and soused, I did what anyone with a bit of ambition would do. I went to college in a big city and stayed there.

Mine is a common story. Every day in America, hundreds of our most talented young men and women flee the suburbs and rural communities for big cities, especially those on the West and East Coasts. Their youthful vigor fuels these metropolises—the cultural capitals of the blue states. These oases of liberal thinking—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boston—are homes to our best-educated people, most vibrant popular culture and most innovative and productive businesses. There are exceptions—some smart people move from cities to the countryside—but the best and brightest gravitate to places where liberalism rules.

Maps showing Kerry’s blue states appended to the “United States of Canada” separated from Bush’s red “Jesusland” are circulating by email. Though there is a religious component to the election results, the biggest red-blue divide is intellectual. “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” asked the headline of the Daily Mirror in Great Britain, and the underlying assumption is undeniable. By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush.

72 percent who cast votes for George W. Bush, according to a University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks poll, believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or active WMD programs. 75 percent think that a Saddam-Al Qaeda link has been proven, and 20 percent say Saddam ordered 9/11. Of course, none of this was true. Kerry voters were less than half as idiotic: 26 percent of Democrats bought into Bush-Cheney’s WMD lies, and 30 percent into Saddam-Al Qaeda.

Would Bush’s supporters have voted for him even if they had known he was a serial liar? Perhaps their hatred of homosexuals and slutty abortion vixens would have prompted them to make the same choice—an idiotic perversion of priorities. As things stand, they cast their ballots relying on assumptions that were demonstrably false.

Educational achievement doesn’t necessarily equal intelligence. After all, Bush holds a Harvard MBA. Still, it bears noting that Democrats are better educated than Republicans. You are 25 percent more likely to hold a college degree if you live in the Democratic northeast than in the red state south. Blue state voters are 25 percent more likely, therefore, to understand the historical and cultural ramifications of Bush’s brand of bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.

Inland Americans face a bigger challenge than coastal “cultural elitists” when it comes to finding high-quality news coverage. The best newspapers, which routinely win prizes for their in-depth local and national reporting and staffers overseas, line the coasts. So do the cable TV networks with the broadest offerings and most independent radio stations. Bush Country makes do with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity syndicated on one cookie-cutter AM outlet after another. Citizens of the blue states read lackluster dailies stuffed with generic stories cut and pasted from wire services. Given their dismal access to high-quality media, it’s a minor miracle that 40 percent of Mississippians turned out for Kerry.

So our guy lost the election. Why shouldn’t those of us on the coasts feel superior? We eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen to better music and know more about what’s going on in the world. If you voted for Bush, we accept that we have to share the country with you. We’re adjusting to the possibility that there may be more of you than there are of us. But don’t demand our respect. You lost it on November 2.

So ...

The only real support that he can find for his claim that smarter people vote Democrat is that more highly educated people tend Left. That is only partly true. As it shows here, Bush and Kerry in fact split the college-educated vote evenly. It was only among those with a postgraduate education that Kerry got a majority—and that is hardly surprising given the heavily Leftist nature of the educational system—particularly at its upper levels. The wonder really is that all the Leftist propaganda of the educational system had so little effect on those with only a first degree. What could be preventing all the Leftist indoctrination from working? Could it be that smarter people are so inherently conservative that lots of them resist the indoctrination? If we allow for the indoctrination, I think the education data suggest that smarter people tend to be inherently conservative! And there is of course direct evidence that Leftist attitudes are most characteristic of people with LOW IQ!

Rall’s second argument is that “Blue States” are better places to live. Whether that is true of course depends on whether you think that places like New York and Detroit are good places to live. And there are certainly differences of opinion about that!

Even more questionable, however, is Rall’s assumption that the Democrat majority in the “Blue States” comes solely from the highly achieving people there. It does not. It is mainly the huge minority presence in the coastal cities that turns their States “Blue”. Without the minority vote, the “Blue States” would probably be redder (more conservative) than the “Red States”!

As for Rall’s claim that Democrats do better economically (“We eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries… “) the fact is that among people earning over $50,000 per annum, 56 percent voted for Bush versus only 43% for Kerry (reference again here). But one must not trouble Leftists with facts, of course.

So Rall’s attempt to provide some sort of objective support for his view that Democrat voters really are superior falls by the wayside and leaves him as simply and baselessly arrogant.

(Cross-posted from Leftism as Elitism. E-mail John .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 06:22 PM in Liberalism & the Left
Comments (3) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Jeff Culbreath on November 12, 2004, 05:41 PM | #

<< Even more questionable, however, is Rall’s assumption that the Democrat majority in the “Blue States” comes solely from the highly achieving people there. >

Yes, that is questionable.

< It is mainly the huge minority presence in the coastal cities that turns their States “Blue”. Without the minority vote, the “Blue States” would probably be redder (more conservative) than the “Red States”! >

But that isn’t true either. Marin County is overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and overeducated - and is perhaps the most liberal county in the nation. As for the various ethnic minority groups, most of these do lean left, but a few of them vote consistently to the right of whites. Asian-Americans in the Bay Area, to take one example, are far more conservative than their white neighbors. Several California counties with very high numbers of Hispanics also voted Red in the 60-70 percent range.

Posted by ziel on November 14, 2004, 03:09 PM | #

Jeff, I think you might have missed the word “mainly” in the statement “It is mainly the huge minority presence in the coastal cities that turns their States “Blue”. “

Posted by Jeff Culbreath on November 15, 2004, 01:54 PM | #

Ziel, I would like to see some substantiation for this claim. I know California pretty well. If you took the Bay Area and the LA basin - the regions which make California “blue” - and emptied them of non-whites, you would not have a more conservative state. The key to understanding California is regionalism, not racialism.

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